Over the past 20 years, the American government has spent millions of dollars sending representatives to United Nations climate change conferences. While the public are advised to walk, bicycle, and take the bus more to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions, hundreds of civil servants have enjoyed tax payer funded flights to exotic locations across the globe to take part in U.N. negotiations to ‘save the climate.’

It makes little difference who is in power. In 1997, the Clinton administration sent 47 representatives to the two week U.N. meeting in Japan where the Kyoto Protocol was created. Ten years later, the Bush administration sent the same number to the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Bali, Indonesia.

President Barack Obama has doubled down on this tradition, with his administration sending 124 representatives to the U.N.’s Copenhagen Climate Conference in 2009 and 79 reps to last year’s conference in Peru. With basic travel and living expenses of over $10,000 per participant for the ten day yearly event, costs now easily exceed a million dollars per meeting.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. There are dozens of climate change conferences administration officials attend around the world each year. Clearly, the sky is the limit when it comes to covering costs for America’s high flying climate bureaucrats.

But don’t expect administration representatives to be seen at a climate conference that is literally down the street if the point of view the U.N. holds dear is seriously challenged.

For example, not one of Obama’s people, not even from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), attended the Tenth International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC-10) organized by The Heartland Institute on June 11 and 12 in Washington DC. 350 people assembled to listen to leading climate science, economics, and policy experts explain how global warming and extreme weather concerns have been vastly overblown. Presenters hailed from major universities such as Princeton, Harvard, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Alabama, and Canada’s University of Victoria. The U.S. Senate, state governments, and prominent international think tanks provided speakers as well and several dozen U.S. state legislators attended as observers.

Had EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy or her representatives travelled the 1.1 miles between EPA Headquarters and the Washington Court Hotel where ICCC-10 was held, they would have learned that much of what the agency is saying about climate change is wrong.

For example, McCarthy would have heard Princeton University physics professor Dr. William Happer tell the audience that the forecasts of models on which the climate scare is based diverge widely from real world observations. “The models don’t work at all,” said Happer, “and yet we’re supposed to believe them and think that this is an existential threat to the world.”

The Administrator would have learned from University of Pennsylvania forecasting expert Professor J. Scott Armstrong that the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecasts that the Obama administration holds dear are untrustworthy since they violate almost all relevant forecasting principals.

McCarthy would have seen the graph from University of Alabama satellite temperature expert Dr. Roy Spencer showing that there has been no global warming since February 1997.

She would have witnessed Dr. Cornelis van Kooten, professor of economics at the University of Victoria, assert that, “Efforts to control CO2 emissions will be carried out on the back of the most vulnerable in global society. Even if nations conclude an agreement to reduce CO2 emissions, it will cost a lot of money but will have no perceptible impact on atmospheric CO2 concentrations.”

McCarthy would have learned from Professor Bob Carter, former Head of the Department of Earth Sciences at Australia’s James Cook University that the announcements of national science academies supporting climate alarm “are based, not on the views of the expert members of the societies involved, but on the views of a small cadre of politically active executives. It is a political consensus. It is not a scientific consensus.”

McCarthy and the EPA missed all this and more because, just as for all past Heartland climate conferences, she and her staff completely skipped the event.

With $1 billion dollars now being spent every day across the world on climate finance, hundreds of millions of it by the American government, it’s about time the Obama administration opened its ears to alternative points of view.

Tom Harris is executive director of the Ottawa, Canada-based International Climate Science Coalition.